Islamic child brides are not illegal in Britain, but as Mazher Mahmood and Marie Woolf discover, imams know they are treading a fine line

THE imam, Mohamed Kassamali, listened intently as the father of a 12-year-old
girl detailed how he wanted his daughter to marry to prevent her being
tempted into a decadent western lifestyle.

“Under sharia [Islamic law] there is no problem,” the imam said. “It is said
she should see her first sign of puberty at the house of her husband.

“The problem is that we cannot explain such things [the marriage] if the girl
went tomorrow to [the authorities]. The other thing is the underage thing
and if tomorrow the girl is, let’s say coerced or forced into this, and she
goes and reports to the police then she will put all of us into the
problems.”

Kassamali, who likes to boast that the Husaini Islamic Centre — the
Peterborough mosque where he is the imam — is the “first Shi’ite mosque in
the whole of Europe”, said he would want to meet